Yesterday, the Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) launched a State Sovereignty Project devoted to persuading all 50 states to aggressively exercise their authority to serve as a check on the ever-growing and often extra-constitutional power of the federal government.

The project, which builds on CFIF’s existing work over the last several years in this area, focuses a grassroots-driven approach to encourage governmental authorities closest to the people – governors, state and local legislatures, state attorneys general and other state constitutional officers – to reclaim and exercise the structural powers granted to them by the U.S. Constitution as a bulwark against federal encroachments on state sovereignty and erosion of the individual liberties of the people they serve. Specifically, CFIF will employ and enhance its numerous forms of paid advertising, earned media, social media and editorial materials, among other methods, as part of an ongoing broad education effort to promote localized grassroots activism.

Yesterday, RealClearPolitics broke a story about Texas Governor Rick Perry being a sleeper candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Today, RCP says that Perry’s Tuesday speech to Republican National Committee members in Dallas is raising his profile significantly.

Republican strategists in Washington told RealClearPolitics that GOP operatives who attended Perry’s speech Tuesday afternoon called them with reactions ranging from “This guy should be our nominee” to “He wowed the crowd.” They said he ditched his notes and spoke extemporaneously, firing away.

The Washington Times went so far as to report that the reaction to Perry was so unusually good from a wide array of attendees at the meeting that there is already discussion of a draft movement under way.

Having worked in Texas state politics while Perry was governor in 2003 and 2005, I can say that his approach to governing is decidedly hands-off. That works in culturally conservative, constitutionally limited Texas. It’s easy to talk about the 10th Amendment when you’re a governor, and it’s not that hard to keep the status quo of low taxes and rugged individualism in a state that pioneered the ethos. With all this, Perry looks and sounds Texan.

But it’s a different ballgame going to Washington, D.C. as the elected head of Leviathan armed with a Tea Party mandate to repeal ObamaCare. Moreover, any Republican elected president next year will have to be able to put the federal government on a different fiscal and cultural trajectory; one that moves away from government dependency, and toward economic growth and personal opportunity within a traditional American framework.

I’m not saying Perry can’t be the conservative savior many in the GOP are waiting for. It’s just that so far, his record indicates little more than a politician who knows how to get elected and leave things as they are. After Obama, that won’t be enough.